Untitled Linux Show 177 Transcript
Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show.
00:00 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Hey folks, this week we're talking about the Ubuntu Core desktop that seems to be missing modulating pulse width on the Raspberry Pi. With Linux, we cover the big new Ryzen 9800X 3D and a whole lot more. You don't want to miss it, so stay tuned. Podcasts you love From people you trust.
00:19 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
This is Twit Trust.
00:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
This is Twit. This is the Untitled Linux Show, episode 177, recorded Saturday, november the 9th. Don't touch that button, hey folks. It is Saturday and you know what that means. It is time for the Untitled Linux Show, where we geek out about Linux and open source and hardware and all kinds of other stuff. It's going to be a lot of fun. Today we've got a full crew, we've got David and Ken and Jeff. We have one plain hooky, but that's all right, we'll forgive him and we've got some fun stuff to talk about, and we're actually going to let Ken go first, because we're going to talk about something that is missing Not a co host, but a distro option. Ken, what's up? Oh no, we have no audio from Ken. Oh, as those that Now we have audio from Ken.
01:23 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I forgot to unmute.
01:25 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I was so scared. I was so scared, I was too. We had problems with Ken's audio before the show started, and so when he came on, it didn't say anything. I could see his mouth moving, but I couldn't hear anything. I'm like, oh no, we're just cursed.
01:38 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
There's the mute button. I shouldn't have touched it.
01:42 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Show title Just the mute button Going off. Quippy Ken don't touch anything.
01:51 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Take it away Ken Jonathan. This week, liam Proven wrote that he hoped to hear news about Canonical's new immutable desktop distro. At the recent Ubuntu Summit, liam stated this time last year, the immutable desktop was a hot topic. The immutable desktop edition will be based on Canonical's existing Ubuntu Core product. For some background, core 24 shipped in June.
02:20
Ubuntu Core is Canonical's existing low-maintenance immutable distro for Internet of Things devices. It connects to an Ubuntu Pro account and you manage it remotely to the extent that you can't log in locally on its console. Significantly cut down. The downloadable x86-64 VM image is only 448 megabytes. It has a read-only root file system and it's built entirely from Snap packages right down to the kernel. The traditional app package manager is not included. It even downloads and installs its own updates, as the Snapd daemon does on normal desktop Ubuntu. It's not something you install. It's distributed as a pre-installed disk image you write to the target machine's boot media. It is designed to be a fit and forget product. This is very different from the ordinary desktop or server editions of Ubuntu, and the challenges of getting a graphical desktop environment running on top of this are substantial.
03:39
Why are we still waiting To answer that question? Liam's article describes KDE's challenging attempt to bring KDE Neon onto Ubuntu Core. Part of the idea of Ubuntu Core is that, because of its integral isolation, it should be possible to roll back updates if they don't work or switch smoothly from a known stable version of something to the latest bleeding edge build and back again. This ability would be ideal for any demo product, such as KDE Neon. Canonical is working on the same concept based on GNOME. Canonical is keen that the first release of the Gravico desktop version not only works, but works well.
04:26
Canonical's engineering director, oliver Smith, replied to the question about where the Core desktop product is, and I'll quote it certainly exists. You know, we have builds of it. We can install it, we can use it. We've done a lot of work to make it installable rather than a disk image. I think the interesting thing is not whether it works, which it does. It's whether it works on the right architecture to deliver against the sort of vision that we set out at the start. Now I'm going to cut off here because I could easily talk for another three minutes about Liam's article, because I could easily talk for another three minutes about Liam's article, but I do recommend reading Liam's article for the rest of the information and Liam's thoughts on Ubuntu Core Distro and when we may see it.
05:16 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, you know there was a lot of interesting things that happened at the canonical summit, the Ubuntu summit. I mean I saw, I think, neil Gampa, a friend of mine that we've interviewed on Floss Weekly before. He's one of the big Fedora slash KDE guys and he was brave enough to do a live demo of some fun Wayland stuff. All kinds of really interesting things that happened at that summit. But yeah, interesting to hear about Ubuntu Core. I would like to see it happen. I think it could be really useful for a certain group of people. It would be good to get out there.
05:54 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Ubuntu Core Distro may be just what Grandma needs.
05:58 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
That's kind of what I was thinking of, yeah, yeah. So, jeff, if Grandma wants to game, what's the new hotness in gaming? Cpus or?
06:09 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
maybe even more than game. The really big news of the week in hardware is amd released the 9800 x 3d chips. In case you don't follow hardware, I'll give a little overview of the chips. The 9800X3D chip is like the 9700X chip that just came out about a month, month and a half ago, in that it has one CCD and eight cores. Just like the 7800X3D chip it has extra cache for the cores. Where the generational difference comes in is where they place the cache. In the Zen 4 chips that's the 7800, the cache was on top of the cores and, like a really big hat, it allowed the cores to keep heat in and not overclock very well. Not to mention there were issues with the memory controller and AMD was afraid people would damage their chips with too much voltage Intel, you know. By placing the cache under the cores, the cores can now radiate their heat to the IHS and off to the external cooler better. So it allows the chips to overclock and run cooler. It features 4.7 gigahertz base clock, boosts up to 5.2 gigahertz and has 64 megabytes of 3DV cache, which is the same as the 7800X3D. It also should go without saying that the new chip can work on the same AM5 socket that the last generation could. Though if you have a current motherboard, it might need to have a BIOS update. So if you're going to reuse your motherboard, it might need to have a BIOS update. So if you're going to reuse your motherboard, check the BIOS first and verify compatibility and what version of BIOS you have to be on.
07:52
If you look at the article in the show notes, michael Larible over at Phronix has all the details on the hardware and software used, along with the exact memory timings and a lot of details For memory. I'm just going to say that he used two 16 gigabyte sticks for a total of 32 gigabytes of DDR5 at 6,000 data rate modules. I should also note that he tested the 9800X3D on both an X670E motherboard and an 870E motherboard chipset, so he covered both chipsets there. As for the other CPUs that he tested, he included pretty much about all of the 13th and 14th generational Intel, along with the AMD 5000, 7000, and 9000 series. So basically, if you've purchased a CPU in the last few years, it's probably on the list, so you can get a good comparison of the 9800X3D to what you have now.
08:50
All right, let's just cut to the chase. Is it the best CPU out there now, as with most things we talk about, it depends Gaming, it's the juggernaut right now. It's the juggernaut right now, and I think it'll be even faster than the 9950X3D for gaming. For gaming, when it's released. When the 9950X3D is released next year supposedly rumors are probably January at Comdex it'll get announced. But remember you'll have that cross CCD delay, and most games don't use more than 8 cores or 16 threads. So you know, gaming, yeah, it's the juggernaut.
09:35
Well, what about productivity, though? Well, that depends as well. Most of the time, it runs about as fast as the fastest 8-core CPU out there, though there are some cases that don't need to cache, where the normal chips can squeak ahead, but not by much. You know, even even if it doesn't win in the eight core or less categories, it's it's still hanging in the in the top. It just doesn't have the cores. For some cases, though, I mean like compiling, you know, that's where chips like the 9950 with 16 cores will just walk away, or the corresponding intel chips. They just have more cores and certain workloads. You have to have the cores. Surprisingly, though, there are a lot of technical workloads like simulations and compressions of various types, uh, or I should say compressors, decompressors, you know some other science workloads where they can use the cache, and it really makes a strong showing, I mean near the top of the charts. And, again, you know most things. The cache can't make up for raw horsepower of the latest generation of chips, but it comes close and sometimes that cache is more important than the cores for raw horsepower of the latest generation of chips, but it comes close, and sometimes that cash is more important than the course. So it's how the load is structured.
10:52
I'll say just take a look at the article in the show notes for the results. There are well over 300 benchmarks, so run, so you'll find something specific to what you're doing. My recommendation, though, is take a look at what you're doing. Gaming, the chip is great, but, again, if you're doing my recommendation, though, is take a look at what you're doing. Gaming, the chip is great, but, again, you know, if you're running a high resolution and you know, maybe turn the graphics up, the chip might not make much of a difference on what you're currently against what you're currently running, because the GPU is more of a bottleneck, you know, but if you're more than a couple generations behind, it might be a good time to upgrade when they come in stock again. They are sold out, and the only ones at the time of this story November 9th, 2024, I could find were from Scalper, selling them for about twice their release price.
11:38
If you do have simulations or science work that you think would really benefit from the extra cash, I would wait for the 9950 version, not because it'll be better for what? Not only because it'll be better for what you're doing, but if you look at those benchmarks and decide that the 9800X3D will still be beneficial and maybe that's based on price, that's a chip you want to go for instead well, by then the buying frenzy should be over and you should be able to get one at a reasonable price, maybe even slightly discounted, by then. Though, keep in mind there are benchmarks where the normal non-3D cache Zen 5 chips come out on top. So pick what's most important. Look to see which chip will benefit you the most at the price you can afford.
12:26
And remember, don't get caught up in the new shiny frenzy. You know it's it's easy to get swept up on that, but some of this stuff is really. Take a look, because if you shave 30 seconds off what you're doing or you gain 20 frames per second. Is it really going to to matter? You know it's up to you and your pocketbook to decide.
12:48 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
But it's new and it's shiny Must have.
12:52 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And it's dropped some of the support for certain things that we no longer use.
12:59 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Has it? Has AMD been? I don't know that AMD is the one that's dropped support. Has it?
13:03 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
No, it's Intel, yeah, yeah, and I think they made a mistake.
13:08 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We'll see if Intel comes back with AVX-512 again on their consumer chips. Yeah, that's an interesting question.
13:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, supposedly Intel said they realized they screwed up this release and there are some fixes they want to implement. There are some fixes they want to implement. I don't know if that means they're going to maybe drop the price of the chips or they've got some reticle revisions they're going to do to try to speed up those chips. But right now, yeah, intel's kind of a nobody's even talking about them and honestly, a lot of times if somebody does, they say, well, I want to get a new Intel chip, get a 1400 series, don't get the new ones.
13:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Is the 1400, one of the ones that eats itself, though it was.
13:50 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
They now have the microcode and the motherboard fixes yeah, so don't buy it used. Yeah, don't buy it. Don't buy it used. Brand new motherboard, brand new chip. Get latest BIOS, latest microcode.
14:04 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
If you find it cheap there's a reason. I'm not even sure I'd want to buy a used AMD chip for that matter.
14:12 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, but it's a little safer Realistically the CPUs are the most solid things.
14:19 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Your motherboard's probably going to go before the CPU does. It's very CPUs anymore, pretty solid, I mean, unless somebody does something dumb with them, which not is what happened yeah, yeah but so be aware of somebody selling a motherboard with intel chip in it already yeah, I've, I've.
14:41
Uh, well, make sure you have it tested before you purchase it, if you can. You know let's see it running in the exact system before you throw over some cash on that. Yeah, yeah, but I know in my experience and everything I've seen, and albeit it's anecdotal, but from what I've heard from everybody else and people that have actually run numbers, yeah, your motherboard's probably going to go out before your cpu does yeah, that checks out, because usually it's the capacitors right, like one of the first things that tend to go on these machines.
15:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
The capacitors blow up. It's not as bad as it was back when we had the capacitor plague, but it's still.
15:16 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
They're still a little on the fragile side that's when the capacitors were dying before hard drives yeah, yeah it was.
15:24 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
It was terrible, they were popping and bulging and and that's why now you'll see a lot of motherboards talk about they're using special military grade high quality japanese, japanese electrolytic capacitors.
15:40 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, it's like, yeah, they know the story, they know what happened.
15:43 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Oh yeah, that is that is crazy and for those that don't remember, there was a string of what about five years maybe in there, like that, yeah, where machines were dying left and right and every time it was capacitors and you'd see them leaking, bulging, popping. You couldn't keep a machine working because the capacitors were absolute garbage. So that's, that's what we're talking about and that was probably what seven years ago About there, ten years ago, something like that.
16:13 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Maybe a little longer ago now than that. And so what happened is I think it was a Japanese company came up with a way to make these super good electrolytic capacitors. Well, an electrolytic capacitor it's where there's liquid, an electrolyte, on the inside of the capacitor. And another company came along and sort of you know, borrowed the idea. I can't remember if it was a Chinese company or a Taiwanese company, I think it was one of the two. I believe it was Chinese yeah, that sounds right Borrowed the idea and started making their own electrolytic capacitors. They were cheaper, so everybody started putting them in everything and come to find out. When they borrowed the idea, they didn't also borrow the secret sauce along with it that kept these things from generating hydrogen inside the capacitors, and so they would just all you know, they'd pop, they would start generating hydrogen and pop and you'd wonder why you get those impulses yeah, there's a lot of
17:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
side note for this segue. There is, uh, the reason. Some of this you think. Why are they being so cheap? The over, the, the margin on a lot of this stuff is just razor thin. I mean just pennies, fractions of one percent and that sometimes fraction of percent.
17:33
Yeah, yeah, sometimes not even one percent. I mean it's. It depends what it is. Now it's not everything. You buy a brand new nvidia video card oh yeah, they're making bank on that, you. You buy like a motherboard or a memory module. That isn't a special whiz bang, something critical. It's probably. You're getting it for just there, you know pennies over the uh cost to manufacture.
18:00 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Yeah, yeah yep, checks out before we jump off of this chip, though, did you see much about the turbo mode? It looks like it does some interesting things, like disabling SMT and disabling one of the core chiplet dies for enhanced gaming performance.
18:22 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Hmm, I didn't see that. I have seen some results where they were used PBO and were overclocking it using the auto method and it was gaining another 5% in just the normal overclocking using the automated tools. And I haven't seen anything yet on manual overclocking, where you're actually manually going in and tweaking the voltages and clocks and all that kind of stuff.
18:56 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Yeah, there was a Gigabyte article, well a headline referencing a Gigabyte press release, where they leaked a little bit of information that nobody else had. So they probably weren't supposed to Talking about the 12 to 16 core versions coming, which is more widely known now, but as part of it they were talking about a turbo mode that does processes that don't take advantage and you actually mentioned cross-chiplet speed issues and stuff so it actually turns those things off and lets you game faster.
19:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, it also makes sense because it's making less heat, right. And then turning off. Smt. That, essentially, is going to turn off what we would think of as hyper threading, and so it's going to run, it's going to run all of your processes on the, the full fat cores, if you will. Um, yeah, it makes sense, it makes sense and the cores are ranked.
19:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So you can, you can look at tool, have tools to look and say you have your, your cherry core that can really crank up, and then some mid-range and then you got a couple, maybe a couple cores in there that aren't, aren't as good. I mean, they'll meet specification, they'll do what they say they're going to do. There's just no overclocking headroom. Well, you can also turn those off. Save the heat drive that you know memory controller, drive the clock controller faster and get a boost.
20:23 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah it's crazy. It's crazy, all right. So let's talk about something near and dear to my heart, and that is the vanilla kernel on the raspberry pi. Right, that's what we're talking about, isn't it essentially?
20:35 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
oh well, we'll get there. I'm more interested in pulse width modulation.
20:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Well.
20:45 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
So the Linux kernel has brought native kernel level pulse width modulation into it. So a little bit of background, because we're used to talking about software and everything and PWM is more of a hardware sort of thing. If you deal with any of the little single-board computers like a Raspberry Pi, beaglebone, or if you've ever done anything with Arduinos, you've probably run into pulse-width modulation, even if you didn't know what you were doing. One of the first things you do with an Arduino is make an LED flash. One of the second things you do with an Arduino is make it dim, and pulse width modulation is how you make LEDs dim. It's also how you can control the speed of certain motors and there's just a lot of different little things you do when you're crossing that software to hardware interface with pulse width modulation. So what pulse width modulation is is normally you think of like controlling a light bulb as you increase the voltage, you get it brighter, you decrease the voltage, you get it darker. Well, when you're dealing with the digital system, it's often referred to as high-low, because high isn't. You might find a 3.3 volt system or a 5 volt system or even possibly 12 or something. So high can be different values, but the point is that it's either on or off, or even possibly 12 or something, so high can be different values. But the point is that it's either on or off, it's high or low, and pulse width modulation is where you control how long it's high out of a given duration, which is known as the pulse width. Typically well, not typically, but like for an Arduino it is 400 hertz, so 400 cycles per second, so 400 times a second. It's going to adjust that pulse and so you wind up with what's called a duty cycle. And that is how much of that pulse is it at 100%? And those are not directly. They don't directly correlate to a level. So like a 50% duty cycle means that 50% of the pulse width it's at high, 50% of the low. But if you've got that tied to an LED, that doesn't mean you're at 50% brightness of the LED.
23:23
So I'm not gonna go any further into the technical background. I just wanted to provide a little bit of a framework before talking about this. But what's really cool about being in the kernel is, while there are some hardware pulse width generators, pulse width generators for all your GPIO or general purpose IO pins, which are digital pins they can't be tied to that hardware just for limitation purposes. So there's been things that could operate in user space that would let you turn it on and off fast enough. But when you're operating in user space you run into timing issues so you may not be as precise and consistent with your modulation as you want to be.
24:13
By moving it into the kernel it's much more efficient, much faster, more reliable. So in the article that I've got linked from Hacksterio, gareth wrote that he mentions he actually quotes developer Vincent Whitchurch that says naturally it can't be as accurate or as efficient as hardware PWM but it is useful in some cases. But then further in the article it compares it to user space, which is what you're really competing with or not competing with but improving. And they said, developer Philip Howard made a comment on Mastodon where he said PWM on arbitrary GPIO pins using a kernel level software driver blows most user space libraries out of the water. So if you want precision in those cases where you can't have access to the hardware, maybe you've already used up all your hardware PWM options for pins. This is going to give you a lot of additional flexibility.
25:28 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely no, that's. That's really cool. I have yeah, I've messed with PWM some, not a whole lot, but a little bit. You also get some devices that really really don't like any. They don't want analog voltages at all, right right, like if they're designed to be driven at 3.3 and you send them two volts.
25:49 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Some things just don't work, don't well, don't work or let the magic smoke out some things.
25:54 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Let the magic smoke out when you do that.
25:57 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Uh, yeah and then that leads into discussion of depending on your frequency and your uh pulse. Then you get into rms values, root mean square.
26:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, that's that's. That's too much math.
26:15 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Let's not bring math into this that's my second story today in calculus. We're going to have oh yes, I do have an electrical engineering degree.
26:25 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
You can't so I guess you don't want me to talk about my second story either this says so, ken, your second story has a little enough math in it.
26:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think we'll be all right yes, but is it really?
26:39 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
handwritten the numbers. I have to say down too, or?
26:42 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
was it typed?
26:47 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
But this week SK wrote about the FFmpeg developers implementing a handwritten AVX 512 assembly code path that resulted in a significant performance boost for specific functions within the multimedia processing library. This optimization leverages the parallel processing capabilities of AVX-512, enabling faster processing of large chunks of data, which is particularly beneficial for video and image processing. There's a lot of math involved with that. There's a lot of math involved with that. If you have one of AMD's Ryzen 9000 series CPUs, then you will benefit from the FFmpeg improvement. Sorry, intel CPU users. Intel has disabled the AVX512 support on its recent core processors. Steve Gibson should agree. This achievement shows the potential and optimizing assembly code for enhancing performance, especially in performance-critical applications.
28:04
High-level programming languages and compilers may simplify software development, but they don't always fully exploit modern hardware capabilities. The FFmpeg developers tackled this issue by utilizing the AVX-512 instruction set. It is a feature even seasoned programmers often overlook. The AVX-512 instruction set allows for parallel processing of large data chunks using 512-bit registers, making it particularly well-suited for computationally demanding tasks like video and image processing. Their efforts resulted in the new code path outperforming standard implementations with a 3 to 94 times performance boost on the AVX512 capable hardware. However, the complexity of AVX512 means that such optimizations are generally limited to specific applications and require specialized knowledge of low-level programming. Ask Steve to help you with that.
29:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, that's neat. I saw some of the chatter about this back and forth on Twitter over the last couple of weeks because the FFmpeg guys were saying we did this thing with handwritten assembly. And apparently some people got back to him and said what are you talking about? Nobody writes in handwritten assembly anymore. The compilers are magic these days. And the FFmpeg guys were like we know what we're talking about. We write FFmpeg. It was great. Apparently, they've got some instances, they've got some examples where it's like let's look at what your magic compiler did with this C code and see what it did in assembly, and it's not great.
29:54
There's some optimization that can be done, yeah, and in some cases you have your C and C++ compilers. They'll try to optimize, but they optimize in the wrong direction, like so you get things like, uh, unwrapping of loops and vectorizing things and it's like, well, those are great most of the time, but sometimes you really don't want to do that and it's it's sort of beyond the pay grade of just a compiler to make that call. So particularly things like FFmpeg, where you really really care about performance and you may be doing the same function, you know 10,000 times, 100,000 times, trying to churn through a video file, where you know you're literally throwing 100 gigabytes around maybe. Well, suddenly it makes sense to go in and look at that, that sort of hand handcrafted optimization of of code. So, yeah, it's cool. It's good to see, jeff, you want to talk steam, I do.
30:56 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
I mean, we did math, so we did our homework. Now it's time for fun. So you know and I don't think it's a secret that I like the game. I wind up covering a lot of the gaming news here because I have experience with some of it. You know I've even covered stories in the past of what I've done because I had to modify my system to play a game.
31:25
My favorite gaming platform, Steam, had a nice update and yes, I've tried many of the other competitors, but overall Steam has easy experience for me. So no shade to the others, it's just my favorite flavor. If you prefer something else, that's okay. This is just me. But back to the update, the biggest feature is the Steam game recording. So if you're a person who likes to share parts of your gaming, Steam now makes it easier by having that feature built in. You do have to be able to run the Steam overlay on your game and if it can, then you can set it to record your gaming experience. You would save a screenshot. This isn't like Twitch streaming and rebroadcast recording, because the file generated will be found in your new recordings and screenshots folder. The quote from Valve says there are many ways to use this all new set of features, from capturing your highlights to documenting entire campaigns. It's easy to find, clip and share your gameplay. So even there it's. You know they're not talking live, excuse me, live streaming.
32:29
There's a lot of other changes for the Linux users as well, such as native Linux games now default to running the Linux runtime, also known as Scout you probably see that in your updates once in a while rather than the legacy runtime environment. Now this should give better compatibility for all Linux distributions. Better compatibility for all Linux distributions. The new client will also detect and pass commands to an already running client significantly faster and even adds a command line option to prevent Steam from inhibiting the screensaver when activities are detected. There are some environmental variables which will be set, which you can set, and they will always fall back. Cause it to always fall back to X1111, even if the environment set to Wayland, so that way you can have some better compatibility if you have something that won't play in Wayland very well.
33:16
Some bug fixes have been included, which are like fixing a slow startup on Linux systems where the reverse host name lookup for the loopback interface is not localhost. It fixes a case where the wrong. Dpi scaling factor is used for systems using non-gnome-based session with an active gnome desktop portal service. So probably not everybody on here, but there's a few people having issues with that. So if you're running non, probably KDE or would be a big one but you're still using the GNOME desktop portal.
33:52
They also fixed a crash when launching Steam Web Helper, and there's several other crashes that they fixed. Another feature re-enabled is the use of installs from the Steam client via the streaming dropdown, improved detection of other computers for streaming and peer downloading when using a secondary wireless interface, and support for AV1 video streaming on high-end systems for remote play, which should speed up everything. There's a lot of fixes and updates that I only covered some of them, so if you look at the article linked in the show notes, you'll see more details. They also link to the official Valve release notes where you can get the full details, along with a history of previous updates. So now that the homework's done, happy gaming.
34:37 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, fun stuff in there, Fun stuff in there.
34:40 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
And I guess X11 is not dead yet, then Well, it'd be X on Waylandland.
34:49 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
So it's running a compatible. I get compatibility layer I had a.
34:55 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I had a problem with the game just today. Actually I had a few minutes to play a little factorio and went to try to copy and paste into it to get a blueprint working and copy and paste wouldn't work. Come to find out it was an ex-Weiland problem and because I'm running with Weiland I had to launch Factorio in Weiland native to get copy and paste to work. So there's still some little issues in there.
35:17 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
And X11 is going to be around for a long time just for compatibility. Yeah, because they've got some old program that everybody uses and nobody wants to update. There'll be some curmudgeon hanging on to their little X11 plushie and not willing to give it up. Yep.
35:36 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
What are you going to do when the creator no longer supports it and doesn't want to convert to Wayland, or is no longer available to convert it to Wayland in some cases?
35:51 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, and that's why you have that X, was it X Wayland? So you have that compatibility layer that are. It's kind of like run and wine only for X on Wayland, kind of kind of how you can think of it. I guess An analogy.
36:10 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, David. Do we really want to talk about this?
36:15 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
No, we really don't. So my next article if you've ever heard the saying if you can't beat them, join them. Well. I guess the inverse of that is if you can't join them, join them. Well. I guess the inverse of that is if you can't join them, try to beat them. I don't know.
36:34
So we mentioned I think it was a couple of weeks ago, linus Torvalds removing commit access from certain Russians, and of course, you know we don't want to get political and there are a lot of good people in a lot of different countries across the world. But one of the interesting things about open source and I'm old enough to have lived through the significant part of this, but I was in my teens when the berlin wall came down and so I grew up at the end of the cold war and there was this new um concept of openness and transparency and relationship and stuff that I really feel like fostered the open source community. Like fostered the open source community Like I'm not sure it could have developed the way it did had it developed 20 or 30 years before it actually did. You know, because, as much as we don't necessarily want to admit it, we are products of the world environment that we grow up in, and so now we see kind of world geopolitics reverting in some extent and we're seeing that play out in the open source community, and so part of that is Russian efforts to create a.
38:07
They've got a ministry of digital development and they're creating a sovereign Linux community, starting with the developers that they say got kicked out of the kernel and they're probably going to fork the kernel as part of this. What will actually happen? Where we wind up? You know, I I don't think any of us have good crystal balls, but uh, it's just something to be aware of and you know, as you make decisions and things, the world's happening yeah, it's, it's a.
38:47 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think everybody should be able to agree that like this is unfortunate that this is where we're at, um. It is kind of just reality. When there are geopolitics going on, you have. You have things like um, like sanctions that happen, and you know, the linux kernel and open source was able to sort of fly under the radar for a long time and apparently they got told by the Department of Treasury that that time was over. And then on the other hand of it, the other side of it, the other side of the coin, this is not an unreasonable thing for the Russian government to do. Right, like, if this is the position that they're in, well, they still would like to be able to have a Linux distro that they can work on. So what do you do? Able to have a Linux distro that?
39:28 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
they can work on. So what do you do? You make your own. This could actually be beneficial from some viewpoints, in that you've got a different kernel that somebody could actually compare to.
39:43 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I kind of am afraid that you're going to get a BRICS kernel right. So that's this very, very loose collection of countries around the world like Brazil and India and China and Russia and probably North Korea BRICS is the term that they use for it and so there's this idea that you may have a Western kernel versus a BRICS kernel and again, I don't think anybody really seriously wants that. It's not a it's not a good idea. Um, it might be something that has to happen, but I, I hope not. I would, I would like, I would prefer let me just put it this way I would prefer to live in a world where open source developers from any country can work together to make things like the kernel better. That's just the kind of world that I want to live in. So we can, we can hope well they disagree
40:34 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
yeah, what's that, jeff? I know china has their own linux distribution. I wonder if the kernel is different in it at all I, I don't know.
40:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
You know, they've got. They've got their own x86 chips too, uh, that I can't remember the name of at the moment, but uh, I think it's loosely based on some amd stuff.
40:53 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Um, yeah, and but you know, and kind of the obviously devil's advocate advocate argument is like oh no, we got russia putting stuff in the kernel, but you can see what they put in. It's all right there, anybody can look at it. So it's, you know it, it and the kernel probably has more people looking at it than anything else. You know, I don't know. I'm kind of with you, jonathan yeah, and I don't.
41:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I don't think that. So I don't think the problem was, I don't think anybody was concerned that the russian developers were going to try to like sneak something malicious into the kernel. I think it was more the other way around, because they were adding support for devices that were then potentially being used in in war, and so they were. They were like they were getting support from the rest of the kernel for these things that were getting used in these ways, and that's I think. I think that's really what rubbed people and what rubbed the department of treasury. The wrong way is that it? It was in some ways an unintentional sidestepping of, you know, these executive orders and these sanctions that were, you know, intended to stop that sort of thing from happening. So, yeah, it is. It is what it is.
42:10 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Well, and it's not like the government's necessarily known for understanding technology. Anyway, it could be. Hey, we forgot about these guys. We got to make them comply and not even fully understand what's going on.
42:18 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, that's true. That's both the gift and the curse of the open source. Everybody can see it, everybody can use it. It's out there for anybody to use however they want.
42:36 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Speaking of making things for everybody, what's up with putting Linux Mint on framework laptops?
42:43 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Let's go ahead and listen to what Bobby Barsoff wrote about. He recently announced collaboration between Linux Mint and Framework Laptops, along with some other exciting updates, in Linux Mint's October 2024 edition of their monthly news blog. Now, in the past, we've talked about Framework's modular approach, allowing you to extend the laptop's lifespan. It also promotes sustainability and reduces e-waste. You can even upgrade the laptop's main board to one of three configurations. Looking at their website, I saw that they had choices in Core Ultra Series 1, such as the Ultra 5 and Ultra 7 processors.
43:29
Clement and I apologize for mispronouncing this, I'm not sure exactly how to say it the driving force behind the Linux Mint project, wrote "'We started working with Framework. "'we're hoping this will lead towards a great partnership'". Now Framework wants to achieve full compatibility with Linux Mint and the Cinnamon Desktop. That's also very important to Linux Mint developers because it means they can recommend Framework within their community without worrying about compatibility issues. Clement wrote I like it. In next month's blog update, clement will review the framework laptop 13 that he received. Bobby also wrote that the Linux Mint team is currently aiming to reduce eye strain for its users by integrating nightlight support into the Cinnamon desktop environment. They are also migrating key Cinnamon dialogues to Clutter this is an open-source software library for creating fast, compelling, portable and dynamic graphical user interfaces. Now I have included the link to Bobby's article, if you do want more detailed information. It does include a link to the monthly news blog as well information. It does include a link to the monthly news blog as well.
44:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, interesting. You know I've been looking at Framework for the longest time. In fact, my dad just the other day texted me. He's like, hey, I'd like to build a laptop. I was like, well, there is a company, there's one company I know of, that will let you do that, only one. So this is cool that they're putting mint on them now. That's pretty neat.
45:14 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
You could actually order it one piece at a time, couldn't you Pretty much? I'm not going to break into that Johnny Cash song. For those that don't know, you can search Johnny Cash one piece at a time. That's great.
45:25 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
It's a great song.
45:27 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Funny song. See, now I've got to try to decide between Framework and System76.
45:32 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Mm-hmm.
45:34 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
It's a challenge. I kind of wish that Framework would ship Cosmic on some of their models. I want that to be an option. I think that'd be great Instead of having to install it yourself. Yeah, yeah.
45:54 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Give me System76 Linux on there. Well, it could I mean once they get Cosmic kind of really stabilized and more complete.
46:02 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Maybe it will. Yeah yeah, we'll see Hope. So, all right, let's see what is up next. The Mozilla Foundation yeah yeah, we're just full of great news today, aren't we guys?
46:17 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, well, this one's a little of a mixed bag. Yeah, so we talk a lot about Firefox in the show and sometimes we also cover Thunderbird. They both come from Mozilla. We also cover Thunderbird. They both come from Mozilla, and the news article linked in the show notes isn't happy news. But I want to clearly state that Mozilla and the Mozilla Foundation are under the same umbrella but they're two different arms of the same company. Not only are there two arms, as we mentioned, but there's also some official community member organizations as well, but we're not going to cover them so, kind of like any large companies, there's several kind of branches underneath. Mozilla considers itself a hybrid organization because the Mozilla corporation is a taxable entity. That now, that's the Firefox and Thunderbird arm, along with other projects they're doing, and they have the Mozilla Foundation, which is a nonprofit. You know and describing what the nonprofit does from Brandon Borman, who's the foundation's chief communication person. He said this about the framework, the Mozilla framework, or, sorry, the Mozilla Foundation is reorganizing teams to increase agility and impact as we accelerate our work to ensure a more open and equitable technical future for us all. That unfortunately means ending some of the work we have historically pursued and eliminating associated roles to bring more focus going forward. Bring more focus going forward. So going off reporting.
47:52
During the 2022 tax season, the foundation had 60 employees and at the time of the layoff they had 120. The announcement of the layoff came October 30th and the foundation executive director, nabi Saeed, confirmed that two of the foundation's major divisions advocacy and global programs are no longer a part of our structure. Now the advocacy group is headed up by Ashley Boyd, which has been a controversial person in that position. She was part of the pay questions on how much some of the higher people in the organizations were making and if her previous experience was technical enough for Mozilla. You know I remember talking about it probably a year or two years ago. There was some questions, but the charter of the group is to stand up for free and open web. Their mission states they're making the health of the Internet a mainstream issue. Their mission states they're making the health of the Internet a mainstream issue and it's also vital as centralization, surveillance, exclusion and other online threats proliferate. We need movement to keep the goals and real momentum on the issues we care about most, including trustworthy AI, increasing our ability to connect and amplify the work of people in the movement, for example, helping fellows become stronger community organizers and leaders, growing diversity and geographical scope across our programs, with an emphasis on expanding our work outside North America.
49:42
Now Borman, who is head of the foundation, did follow up later and said while the advocacy group is gone, they still believe in advocacy and they're just going about it a different way. What does that mean? Well, even the author of the article linked in the show notes says spin or sincerity never easy to tell. So you know, did we hear corporate speak? Do they really mean it? I guess time will tell.
50:08
Keep in mind that this February the corporate side of Mozilla now that's the Firebird, thunderbird so on laid off 5% of their workforce after canceling some of their side projects as they were trying to cut costs and save money there. The author does go on to make a good point that, while the foundation doesn't have a flashy role because they're not putting new features into the programs, that we know they are fighting for is to keep the web a better place and more open. So he argues that that could be even more important than the actual corporate side. I'm sure my co-hosts will have a few thoughts on this, so I'll end my story now and let them comment. But do take a look at the story in the show notes as it has a lot of supporting links to what the author has written.
50:53 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so this is, uh, this is definitely a multi-layered story. I've seen some chatter about this. Um yeah, that's a lot to unpack. I'm just going to say I think the good people at Mozilla need to spend way more time thinking and working on the actual technology and way less time on everything else. And I'll just leave it there for my input on this particular story. And if you know, you know.
51:27
Better to stay quiet and say anything well, it's just, it's something not everybody agrees on and this is, this is my opinion, and other people can have different opinions, and that's fine, and I am not here to fight over those. You know, political and and uh, ideological and and sort of uh, what's, what's the term that?
51:46 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
oh, I I asked Mozilla to do. Keep Firefox a secure browser.
51:51 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, please.
51:57 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, and work to make it. Give it features, not flashy bling that start eating into Chrome. Start looking at what does Chrome do and why are people switching to Chrome versus Firefox and really start attacking that and get that user base back. But on a side note, as Steve Gibson fans have obviously known that you block origins not going to work in Chrome for much longer unless you run you block light. But Firefox said they, they're going to they, they're gonna keep it going on firefox, so maybe that'll help.
52:33 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah yeah, all right, um, so what about what is next? Ah, david, oh yes, this is fun. This is fun, it's uh, it's, it's, it's balmer's, it's balmermer's historic pronouncement coming true Linux is actually viral.
52:57 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Oh, linux is not viral but just like any powerful tool, you can use it to do bad things, and if somebody else is using the tool and you don't know what's going on, it can do bad things to you. So I have linked an article from Bleeping Computer, although there were a lot of different publications that mentioned this past week. There have been instances of Windows getting infected with a Linux VM that creates a tunnel home and therefore becomes a platform on the host to give persistent network access. So this is more of a Windows story than a Linux story and I'm not going to focus on that, no matter what my co-hosts were picking on me about earlier, but the thing that I thought that jumped out at me was that they were using QEMU as the virtual machine, and that caused me to go dig into QEMU, because I've always seen QEMU and KVM together and I always thought that QEMU was just a front end for KVM to make interfacing with a little bit easier. I didn't realize that you can almost think of it more like a virtual box or something where it's got its own virtual machine but then it can tie to backends. So I learned something about QEMU. I also learned that there are Windows binaries for it.
54:43
Now to get back to the issue here. Back to the issue here, what they're doing is they are packing up a customized Tiny Core Linux VM and of course, you know, one of the beautiful things about Linux is you can make it really small and still be functional. So it's actually a 285 meg zip archive. Now it's coming as an attachment to a phishing email that pretends to be a quote one American survey. When you click through the link, what it does is it launches in the background a PowerShell command that extracts the downloaded archive, copies it in, launches QEMU, starts the virtual machine.
55:32
The virtual machine itself is configured to connect back out to a command and control server. It appears that it is a persistent connection. They mentioned that it's using a tool called Chisel, which is a network tunneling program, but I would assume that you could do the same kind of thing using something like WireGuard or possibly even OpenVPN, because almost any VPN service can be configured to connect automatically on system startup. So anyway, the main takeaway from this is keep an eye on what applications are running in the background, and that's true for every operating system. Windows just might be a little more at risk than others, and that's just a new and interesting way that attack surfaces are evolving.
56:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, so I looked at this too. Did you look into the Chisel tool?
56:40 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
at all. I did not. I was more interested in the QEMU on Windows.
56:46 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Chisel is an open source tool, by the way. Qemu on Windows. Chisel is an open source tool, by the way. It is TCP connections over HTTP, encrypted with SSH. Okay, so it's TCP over SSH over HTTP. It's crazy and it is intended to. They do that specifically just to avoid being seen. It's crazy and it is intended to um it. They do that specifically just to to avoid, you know, being seen by you know firewalls and all of that it's mimicking.
57:18 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
So that would actually get around the most firewalls, wouldn't it?
57:22 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I, you know, I do occasionally have times where I have to go connect to somebody's corporate network and I'm like, hmm, I wonder if I could get chisel running on my phone inside of term. Hucks, be fun, uh, anyway. So yeah, that's very, very interesting to see the, the, the poor windows users.
57:40 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I've couldn't happen to nicer people I know.
57:46 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Terrible, terrible Windows users.
57:50 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, all right, let's get into some command line tips and let's start with Ken. It is you know, ken, it is uniquely fun and interesting and hilarious that you are in the midst of a Pipewire command line tip series when you had problems with your sound today.
58:08 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
I would like to suggest that you don't demo this one live.
58:13 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
The only thing I'm going to demo live is how to get the help information.
58:19 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
There you go.
58:22 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Which is the command itself, is pw-cat or pwcat, and, as I mentioned, this is another of the pipewire commands that I'm going to be introducing Now. Pwcat is a simple tool for playing back or capturing raw or encoded media files on a pipewire server. So what could possibly go wrong? Now, I have only played around with a few of PWCAT's options. I'm going to just keep calling it PWCAT for brevity. Now I'm going to start off by typing pw-cat space, dash, dash, help, since that's going to be the first one that we have and, just like with the others, it gives you helpful information about how to use it. For those of y'all listening, I did exactly that, and it comes up saying that you would have a pw cat, followed by the options and then a file if you're going to be playing back a file or recording to a file, or you can put a dash to have it just go to standard output. Now, as with pipewire and pwtop, you can do dash dash version to show your version. The one that's going to be really helpful with pCAD is the dash V or dash dash verbose, since this enables verbose operations. So you can see what it's doing. It basically is sending streams and, of course, you've got the capital R or dash dash remote. So if you need to connect to a remote daemon, I'm still going to have to research into that and find out if I have to set up another computer to play with that feature. Then you've got a dash dash media dash, followed by either type, category or role, and that lets you set the media's type, category or role. For type, the default is audio. For category, the default is audio. For category, the default is playback. For row, your default is music. Then you've got dash dash target. This is where you enter the target that you're going to use for the playback, in other words an audio output. Or, if you're recording, you'd indicate an audio input for audio and most of the information indicates that it's primarily for audio or MIDI. No-transcript. It's not so much an alias, it's actually hard-coded with all the default options. So you can just say pw-play and then the name of the audio file that you want to play. Now if you're working with MIDI, you do pw-midiplay or midirecord to either play or record MIDI.
01:01:30
Now here's one that I don't have the hardware for. It's the dash dash DSD or dash D. It's for the DSD mode. Now DSD stands for digital stream or direct stream digital. It's a high resolution format that produces high resolution signal in a different way to that employed by the PCM system. That can be transmitted as WAV, flac or AIFF. But that's it. Today I was hoping to do a demonstration of playing an audio file, but that had the audio output source is currently disconnected today because of having to reboot and reconfigure some stuff, and I did notice when I was playing around with it that some of the audio outputs seemed to move around a bit, and I'm seeing that with KDE it likes to put in some KWIN and Plasma nodes as well.
01:02:38 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yes, interesting stuff. One of the other fun things that you might see using some of those tools is that your video stuff is starting to show up there, and I saw we were looking before the show started, again messing with uh trying to get his audio working that he had, uh, he had video devices showing up in um, this qp, uh w graph. Yes, yes, yeah, in the various graphing things they'll start now they are aware of video devices. So that's cool, cool. I am very much looking forward to Pipeware getting even better with doing video stuff. That's going to be a lot of fun.
01:03:15 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Yeah, and the high-speed format Ken's talking about that wasn't PCM. It's a high-speed single-bit digital format and that's how you recreate your audio signals. So instead of slower parallel, it's faster single bit. Yep, Cool. Have you got the hardware that supports it? No, it, there's, very it's. It's not a widely certain formats used it, Like I want to say I think it was DVD HD. Yeah, there there were some certain high res music formats that did, but it wasn't as common as the PCM. That's that's kind of probably 90% of the market. Yeah, it's tight to specific hardware.
01:04:03 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
All right, Jeff, do you want to talk about Envy top?
01:04:06 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Sure, this, this one's a little safer and there, but I safer. But I do not have a demo for this. It would just kind of be a boring graph and side note instead of saying what could possibly go wrong. I always like the phrase. Let the hilarity ensue.
01:04:23
So now NVTop is my command line tip. Now, we have covered this before, specifically Jonathan did, did, but it was in with a ton of other similar commands, so I thought I would revisit this and go into a little more detail specifically on this. Now you probably think, oh, nv, nvidia, no, it's neat. Video card top is what this stands for. Now it can handle multiple gpus. So, like when I run it on mine, it will see both, not only my integrated GPU that's built into my CPU, but it'll also see my external add-on video card. So it will detect both of them and it will show everything for both of them, which I'm not using my internal one, so there's not much to see. I'm not using my internal one, so there's not much to see. And it can handle many. So not only can it handle multiple GPUs, it can handle many different kinds.
01:05:19
So the currently supported hardware is AMD. When you're using the AMD GPU driver, apple, but it's got limited M1 and M2 support, so it's not all there. Huawei, if you're using the Ascend software. Intel, if you're using the i915 slash XE drivers, it can do it. Nvidia you got to use the proprietary drivers, so Nouveau won't work. Qualcomm, adreno you need the MSM driver. And Broadcom VideoCore you need the V3D driver.
01:05:53
So, just like the various top versions, it has a lot of options so you can customize what you want to see and how you want to see it. For example, like I hit F2, it gives me a little graphical menu. I could turn off the display for my internal GPU, my integrated GPU, because, like I said, I don't use it. So no sense having something that's basically giving you zeros and flat charts and things like that. If you follow the link in the show notes, you can get to the site to see how to make it work on different hardware. So they're really good about going through and making it work depending on the different graphical hardware you have and different distributions, and it also goes through what options are supported and it even goes through the instructions.
01:06:40
If you want or need to build it from source, because maybe your particular distribution doesn't have it packaged for you, I will say that. You know I use it, like when I'm running folding at home, to monitor the temps of my cards so I can make sure nothing's overheating. I can look at the load on them to see how everything's going. So it's just good when I want to focus on the GPU. So honestly I can tell it's a good indication when I need to clean the filters or blow the system out, because I can see the temperature trends and know, oh, this is getting a little warmer, I better get the vacuum out and clean out the system. So follow the link in the show notes for all the GPU information goodness you ever need.
01:07:24 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I am a little disappointed that NVTop does not seem to work with the open source amd drivers and now I have to go back and look and see which one does, because I know I found one that does it's been a while.
01:07:35 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
If you look, if you look up, you might see it in the the story you did this. I think there's about six different graphical tops you had in there yeah, I'm sure it is there.
01:07:45 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I'll have to go back, maybe I'll. Maybe I'll bring that one back in a week or two. It'll be fun, all right.
01:07:52 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Yeah, Ken, it's interesting. I was going to say I noticed that the GitHub's readme mentions that it can work with the GPU for Raspberry Pi 4.
01:08:09 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Does it work with Raspberry Pi 5 also? I don't know. We'll have to try. I've got a couple of 5s around here. I can check it out here in a bit.
01:08:17 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
I can try putting it on mine and seeing if it does.
01:08:21 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, alright, I've got something I want to talk about real quick. This is going to be kind of a two-parter One this week and, if I remember to come back to it, we'll get another one next week, because there was a very real problem that I had to solve and I used an SSH jump host to do it. And then there's a second trick you can use to get your SSH keys accessible on the end host. So we're going to start with the real easy one, and that is doing an SSH jump server, and this is honestly pretty trivial. You can just use SSH and then dash capital A, dash capital J and user at server being the jump server, and then user at and then your destination server. And so what it's going to do then is SSH is going to try to log into that jump server and then from there it will automatically tunnel you through a connection to your endpoint server.
01:09:22
And so in my case I use this, where I've got some websites I host and I've got one machine that has the external IP address and then multiple machines behind it reverse proxy and I use a jump server to be able to get directly to one of those proxied machines, and that is very useful for doing certain things. So I've got a link to one of the articles I use to get this figured out and give it a play. It's a lot of fun and for certain cases it is super useful. And the next week we'll come back and talk about how to make your uh your SSH keys play nicely with that. All right, david.
01:10:03 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Well, I was just looking at that. That's pretty interesting. I've never actually done a jump server. Pretty interesting, I've never actually done a jump server. What I've done is SSH in and then do a port forward to an SSH port behind it and then connect through the tunnel.
01:10:17 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
I think it does the same thing.
01:10:18 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
It just does it automatically for you.
01:10:20
Yeah, and that's kind of cool. Yeah, I was reading through that there. Okay, so my tip Ah, yes, I. We were actually talking about Mozilla a little bit earlier and I have always preferred the Mozilla browser, but there have been times when it just is too clunky or too not useful for me to be a daily driver. And then there was a project called Arc which was made by the browser company, and they started on Mac and then they ported to Windows. It was like this whole reconceptualizing how the browser worked and there was some hype around it. I think it might have been Chief Twit that got hyped on it for a little while.
01:11:16
I actually got that and installed it and didn't really get into it. One of the things that I liked about Microsoft's Edge browser it's a Chromium browser but it had tabs on the side and I really liked that. But I hated a Chromium browser but it had tabs on the side and I really liked that. But I hated using Chromium, I hated using Edge and I wanted to go back to Mozilla. So this last time I was doing a search, I came across Zen Browser. I also, for the first time, actually have it set up where I can show stuff. So let's see if this works.
01:11:50 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
Let the hilarity ensue.
01:11:52 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Yeah, exactly Okay. That's why it didn't work. Let's try this. Hey, look at that. It worked, okay.
01:12:05
So this is the Zen browser. It is a modification of Mozilla Firefox and what I really like about it it is an alpha version, as you can see right here, well, sort of right there, the join the club, which is very important you should do. That Covers it, but the latest version is V101-a.18. There is a very active Reddit community around the Zen browser, which is actually it was a Reddit search where I ended up first getting introduced to it. It's been my daily driver for about three weeks now, but, as you can see, this is a web page and there's like nothing here. Like you was just the web interface, and that's what I love about it. Like because that's been one of my frustrations is almost every web browser, and that's one of the big reasons why I had a problem with Firefox is because Firefox is really heavy on its borders and you can get themes and extensions and stuff, but I prefer something because it's daily driver or search something. I don't have to do a lot of work to get it to work for me and this one just worked.
01:13:20
Now, it's not without its quirks, it is alpha, but it's got tabs on the side. You've got your menu bar up here. If you go into your settings which you can actually see I use Privacy Browser and Bitward you go into settings, it's got all of the various settings Because it's Firefox. You have all the Firefox extensions and labs and everything, and then you can turn everything on, or you can do it the way I prefer, which is with everything hidden. And I actually already have a bug or something that I've run into right now because it's not hiding the top bar like it's supposed to. Uh, when I switch in and out, and that was working like earlier today. So it's the demo curse. You can yep, but uh, let's turn off compact mode. You can put tabs on the left, you can do tabs on the right, it's just. It's really cool user interface and I've been using it as a daily driver for a while now and it's been working fine for me. So if it's something that's where you like that clean browser interface, I'd say give it a go.
01:14:49 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Yeah, I may have to check that out. That does look pretty cool. Get something on my machine that gets used other than just Google Chrome, because you know, there are reasons why one might not want to use Google Chrome. All right, let's let each of the guys get in the last word if they want to, and, as usual, I'm going to go in the order of their pictures, and so we're going to let Dave go first. He just got done talking, so hopefully he's had a chance to get his whatever he wants to plug and hold up. David, what do you want to plug?
01:15:23 - David Ruggles (Co-host)
Oh, I don't really have anything to plug, although now that I have this new functionality where I can put things on my screen, I might come up with a really cool background image like Rob, because we all want to be like Rob. So I guess I'll plug Rob, since he's not here. Send him a coffee.
01:15:42 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
We all want to be like Rob. Now there's not the statement I thought I would hear today, Ken.
01:15:50 - Ken McDonald (Co-host)
Well, just want to recommend that everybody takes the time to back up, back up and then back up again and occasionally test that backup.
01:16:05 - Jeff Massie (Co-host)
All right, and Jeff you can find me on Maston at jeff underscore massey. I don't think I've really said much of anything there, but you know I'm there just in case you want to say hi or whatever. Now this, I do have a poem. This one's right right up the alley for david. Yesterday it worked, today it's not working. Windows is is like that. Thanks everybody, have a great week.
01:16:35 - Jonathan Bennett (Host)
Beautiful. I like it. All right. Thank you all for being here. I do want to plug. Of course we've got Hackaday and that is where Floss Weekly is at as well had a lot of fun this past week with Floss Weekly. We chatted with Daniel Stenberg about Curl and LibCurl and TrueRL, which is something new that they're doing. It was a lot of fun and it's a real throwback for Floss. We had Randall on as the co-host. We talked with Daniel way back at like episode 51 of Floss Weekly, so it's been over a decade ago. So go check that out. And, of course, don't forget about Club Twit. Join the club if you're not part of it already. It's about the price of a cup of coffee per month and you can support your favorite network, get ad-free shows, get access to our video feed if you don't have that already. All kinds of good stuff. We appreciate everybody being here, those that caught us live, those that get us on the download. We'll be back. We'll be back next week. We'll see you then on the untitled linux show.
